Shorn

[Above photo: Geting a trim at the Beauty Parlor next door.]

3 May 2020

Can you believe it? (My rant for the week.)

After my Zoom class from 9-12 today, a former student with her husband and 5yo son came to visit and bring me lunch. Anawar Yee Nyo is a total sweetie and smart; I went to her PhD graduation ceremony a few months ago. Her boy, Aung, is autistic with no functional language. She was determined to bring me lunch, she messaged me yesterday. They sat and watched me as I ate it and Aung dis-assembled the living room. He didn’t break anything, just moved stuff around trying, it seemed to me, to get objects to do something. Autistic children don’t develop representational play, so a bit of plastic with 8 wheels in the form of a truck is just a bit of plastic and, accordingly, boring, not a fantasied play-object. I wonder how he’d do with a pet, something more animated.

After lunch I found myself sitting in a chair with Anawar on one side of me, operating scissors and a comb and her hubby on the other, running my electric hair trimmer. A pile of hair on the floor later, I  had a hair-cut. Inspired, after they left I cut off my beard and mustache and shaved all clean. I’ve only had those two off x2 since 1968 when I grew a full beard during my residency in Medicine. Both times my wife and kids demanded I re-grow, since I looked too unfamiliar (I like to think. Not that I shattered mirrors.) I’m not sure how I feel but it is kind of nice not to have white-grey chin whiskers advertising my age. Why? I don’t want to be this old—-I have many more things I want to do and some of them require I am fit and stronger than you’d expect a near-80yo to be.

Reading an interview with Laurie Garrett (The Coming Plague and others), she suggests that we are in a 36 month period  with this virus. In Myanmar Covid-19 is supposed to peak in August. I may not get home to Beach Island this summer. Cripes!

One of the crueler coordinated moves is DT’s order to open the meat-packing plants. They closed because the workers are in very close proximity and the Covid-19 rates were skyrocketing. Citing our food supply, he is doing it without any safety directions for the owners. It is similar to when George W. Bush made chemical discharge control a choice of the factory owners, optional. Since the meat packing plants will be open, any workers who stay away to protect their health and that of their families are no longer entitled to unemployment benefits. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Evil Mitch is holding up the next funding relief package until the Dems agree to a no-liability clause for the meat-packing factory owners: Hormel, Tyson, Smithfield—-huge, rich corporations and generous Republican donors. The laborers who would get ill would, thus, have no recourse to address the owners’ neglect of safety standards. It’s like Wisconsin voting—forcing people into dangerous situations— but worse. Of course, the vulnerable are largely poor and non-white. We could eat vegetables, fruit, nuts, and grains and skip meat for awhile. Numerous super-elite athletes are strict vegetarians. It would likely be better for our health, as well. Perhaps the owners don’t want us to get out of the meat habit and realize we don’t really need it.

Lila, meanwhile, is so beautiful and smart and impetuous, bringing ruin upon herself. The drama of her life is over the top. As Lenu says to Lila’s son in the first episode, “Your mother always went too far.” It is especially dangerous among the poor in Naples, where the strong (and brutal) survive. I had a patient once who, when stationed with the US military outside Naples, would ride on a motorbike with a buddy and snatch purses from women pedestrians. Not such a good thing. Later, he was furloughed from his work at a large corporation for a work-related back injury, collecting benefits until someone filmed him in his front yard heaving logs about and mowing the lawn. It gives the disabled a bad name.

We’ll play Texas Hold-em tonight on Pokerface, an internet poker site. Our group has a well-defined complexity, some looking to Dante and TS Eliot for inspiration, others sinking into Lust and Sloth. We’ll see if virtue triumphs. In any case, I thank Clementina. I was looking through some poetry and found a stanza in Italian preceding The Love Story of J. Alfred Prufrock. The poem is a marvel but I’ve never understood the Italian. Clem is Italian and happened to mention it to her mother, who is re-reading Dante and gave her an exact translation. Much [envious] jeering from the Lusts and Sloths, but those of a higher nature appreciate the beauty of anything written by Dante Alighieri. [I realize this paragraph will be unintelligible except to the small circle of our poker group. I seem to have run out of intelligible things to say.]

I’d forgotten that DT managed to get one of the alleged victims of Bill’s lust in the front row at a DT-Hillary debate. I’m glad Joe has encouraged a careful investigation of Tara Reade’s allegations. A bit different than DT’s response—“Never happened.” or “She’s not my type”. For the latter read, “If she were, I would have raped her, sure.”

DT is demanding a release of Joe’s private Senatorial papers, in storage at the University of Delaware. Of course, there would be nothing there about Tara Reade’s accusations (She just backed out of her Fox News interview, BTW.) but the ‘Pubs figure they can cherry-pick and get some good campaign ad material. I’d say, Sure, when you release the tax returns you promised and all the information related to the many sexual harassment accusations against you, even from those women who you paid off. DT is a serial molester; Joe has had poor boundaries, rubbing shoulders and necks, a very different kettle of fish.

I don’t know if this is so random because I am gradually, unwittingly, going stir-crazy or because I don’t have my customary external stimuli which keep me writing. Otherwise, I turn inward, miss having a mate with me, and simply think about how messed up the world seems right now.